This month I am experimenting with a new sponsorship system on the zuggsoft.com site that will allow MUDs to advertise with small banner images. I am doing this test with Iron Realms for their Achaea MUD. After the first test month, I will expand the system to allow other MUDs and banners depending upon how it works. Please help support Zugg Software by supporting our sponsors.

This month (May) I am trying a bit more extensive sponsorship system test. You'll notice that when viewing the list of posts in a forum, the navigation menu and the sponsor box will be shown on the left side (just like when viewing the list of forums). When you are reading a post, the sponsorship box is placed at the top before the thread.

I experimented with putting the sponsor box in the left column in the thread view, but I was worried that this would reduce the screen width used for reading posts too much for most people. If you think it would be better to have it on the left side like on all the other pages instead of at the top, let me know.

Keep in mind that in future months, there will probably be more than one sponsor banner. The banners on the left will grow vertically, while the sponsors at the top of the forum post page will grow horizontally.

I'm afraid I have to second that motion. Animated banners are hell of annoying - the only salve is that these ones are easy to scroll past.

My two favourite advertising-supported sites are probably BoingBoing and Danny Choo - the former sometimes has animated ads and they annoy my bum off on there as well (so I've started browsing entirely by RSS), and the latter never has and I don't mind the ads whatsoever.

I dunno if animated banners have better response rates, but they definitely cause frustration :(

I understand there is a probably a lil bit of annoyance/reward ratio calculating going on here. Thou in my own case, annoying animated banners rarely make me want to click the any more than a regular one, BUT.... I happen to use remote desktop a fair bit, as such, animated banners are serious refresh rate KILLER. Other wise I can't say I complain too much about them.

_________________"To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them" - Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

Animated/Flash banners *do* have a higher click-through ratio. It's been shown many times, which is why advertisers prefer them. So they aren't going away anytime soon.

On this site, the animated banner is only displayed on the specific sponsored forum thread pages at the very top. If you use the links in the "Recent Forum Posts" list on the left side of the forum page to go to the most recent post in a thread, then you'll usually never see the banner. I think this makes them the least obtrusive that I possibly can make them (as opposed to always having banners at the top of the page in the web banner area).

While I posted this to get your feedback and understand your frustration, as long as there are some MUDs willing to help sponsor this site, you have several alternatives:

1) Run ad-blocking software in your web browser.
2) Just ignore them
3) Get more people to buy CMUD so that I don't need the banner income to help stay in business.

or, wait until after this banner experiment is over next month and see if any MUDs are actually willing to keep paying the money for the banners.

Wow, confirmed. That's certainly a weird killer. Anyone know of a quick fix to make a flash image go more into the background? I'd hate to start messing with the menu system that I'm using on this site since they will kill a couple more days of programming work. Our menu system here is pretty old and doesn't use simple CSS stuff...it's all Javascript. It's one of the many things that needs to be rewritten, but just not something I've had time for.

But I have no idea what would cause the flash image to appear above the menu drop-down...that's just plain weird!